Introduction
From its inception in 1871, the Slade School of Fine Art in London attracted artists from around the world. Slade, London, Asia: Contrapuntal Histories between Imperialism and Decolonization takes the Slade as a starting point for a global microhistory and a reimagined and refigured archive. This feature surfaces how the Slade functioned during the post-war period as a site of encounter, decolonization, and expression for overseas artists; it also presents archival records which illuminate how the Slade occupies a complex place in the global history of art education, art practice, empire, and decolonization.
This feature consists of two interwoven parts. The first is a narrative history in the form of an academic essay that conceptualizes and interrogates the Slade’s role as a transversal line, which at its points of intersection with other lines—such as those tracing histories of colonialism, decolonization and nation building, of concurrent institution building, or of modernist aesthetics—creates contrapuntal nodes, or complex sites of multiple entangled and resonating histories. The second part of the feature is this offering of an “animated” archive that brings together materials from multiple institutional and personal archives in Asia and the UK, presented in a manner that invites readers to consider them in a non-linear fashion. Throughout this feature, we build upon Edward Said’s use of the musical metaphor of contrapuntalism to address both the presence of empire in the metropolis and the construction of a transnational counterpoint with multiple voices and melodic lines in order to tune in to histories at the intersection of imperialism and decolonization.
In this approach, the Slade is configured as a transversal line that links multiple histories from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Indonesia, Singapore, Nigeria, Sudan, Uganda, Britain, and beyond. While we began with the focus on tracing connections between the Slade and artists and sites in Asia, the research evolved iteratively, and came to defy the parameters of the “London, Asia” project. Indeed, the documents showcased here have illuminated important alignments and transversals that extend beyond Asia, taking us to parts of Africa as well as parts of Britain beyond London. In this sense, these archival fragments also help us to position the Slade as one of many transversals and sites of relational comparison through which to analyse multiple colonial and postcolonial histories of art education.
The constellations of records presented here also shine light on some of the many interconnected and difficult histories, visual languages, and pedagogical frameworks that emerged out of the Slade’s particular transnational context at the intersection of imperial, decolonial, and migration histories. Working through archival material with this framing, and reading them against and along their grain, has allowed us to understand and represent the Slade as an institution that contributed to, but did not fully determine, the formation of the artists who attended it. Many of the artists featured in this research were mid-career when they arrived at the Slade, and were often supported by scholarships or schemes designed to develop capacity for newly independent nations and construct Britain as a post-imperial power. The artists brought with them their own vocabularies, ideas, ambitions, and conundrums, contributing to the contrapuntal environment at the Slade. The records featured here convey artists as institutional subjects in which the Slade functions as an authoritative intermediary, as well as (auto)biographical figures, postcolonial interlocutors, actors, and visionaries.
The project has evolved from two long-term collaborative research projects: “Transnational Slade” and “London, Asia”. The collaboration activates an alchemy of archival studies and art history, opening up the field of research to new intersections, and enabling us to refigure the archives we draw on and co-constitute. Setting an aim to “animate the archive” foregrounds (an) archive(s) as the subject of activation and illumination. It suggests we are bringing to life what has passed. Yet archives, considered through archival studies, are not inert, nor solely concerned with the past; they carry agency and hold different affordances in the present. In this sense, through this research, we seek not to animate but rather to refigure the archive and assume that archives, in their plurality, are important subjects of study in their own right.
Although our research has resulted in this initial publication with its own particular framing and moment of archival activation and authorship in a form akin to an exhibition, the collaborative ethos of the project has encouraged the sharing of archival knowledge in order to seed new research beyond the scope of this project. The journey has led us to an array of personal, family, institutional, and organizational archives (both formal and informal), as well as oral histories and research workshops. The open access, digital format of British Art Studies lends itself to embedding different types of records in a variety of formats, which provides opportunities to make visible the qualities and patterns of these records as they are distilled from different recordkeeping contexts and activities.
This is Part 1 of a two-part feature, which addresses the period from about 1945 to 1965; Part 2 will encompass the period from the 1960s to the 1990s, and incorporate material gleaned from upcoming workshops. The contrapuntal histories of art education presented here offer a global microhistory situated within the complex entanglements between imperialism and decolonization. They have also prompted reconsideration of ways to engage with, co-constitute, and curate a research archive in pursuit of this endeavour. We take the Slade as a starting point for exploration, but render it as a single melodic line in a polyphonic counterpoint. As such, these transversally linked and co-constituted histories provide new methodologies for writing the histories of contrapuntal modernisms, while also understanding art in Britain itself as the product of empire.
